ETF’s Enhance Digital Teaching Platform coming soon

The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) is launching the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform later this month. It aims to support teachers and trainers across the FE and Training sector to develop their practice using technology.

The Enhance Digital Teaching Platform will be presented for the first time at the Bett Show in London on Friday 25 January. Its key features include 40 free, bite-size, certified online training modules mapped to the Digital Teaching Professional Framework (DTPF). Modules have an achievements badge system rewarding and motivating teachers and trainers to explore and share as well as lead innovation in teaching. Designed with a clean and engaging user-experience in mind, the modules are all mobile, tablet and desktop formatted.

The DTPF competency framework, launched by ETF in November 2018, promotes a set of professional standards for supporting learning through technology with the aims to establish a common understanding of digital skills development. Both the Enhance Digital Teaching Platform and DTPF are relevant to all types of teachers, trainers and assessors across the FE and Training sector, including those working colleges, work-based training, adult and community education and offender learning.

Head of Learning Technologies at ETF, Vikki Liogier, explains the strategy behind these developments:

“The Enhance Digital Teaching Platform is a professional development solution underpinned by the Digital Teaching Professional Framework (DTPF). In effect, it will bring the DTPF competency framework to life by offering free, online training when practitioners identify areas they want to find out more about or skills they want to develop.

“The guiding light for both DTPF and the Enhance Digital Training Platform has been pedagogy – teaching practice – rather than technology. We have focused on how technology can help teachers and trainers in their current professional practice, as well as helping them to extend their practice.”

The DTPF was built in collaboration with Jisc – a not-for-profit organisation which provides digital solutions for UK education and research. It is mapped to the Jisc Digital Capabilities framework and ETF’s Professional Standards and draws on the EU Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators.

There are seven elements to the framework which cover different teaching contexts and activities (see the diagram). The competency statements – definitions of what competences a teacher or trainer will demonstrate for each element – are mapped onto three stages of personal development:

Stage 3: Leading – practitioners pass on their knowledge, critique existing practice and develop new practices.

Teachers and trainers can use the framework as a reference point for self-reflection and a basis for considering potential training needs. The framework is available for download on the ETF website.

The full Enhance Digital Training Platform incorporating the framework will be launched at the BETT Show, Excel London, at 3.30pm on Friday 25 January in the Post 16 Theatre. To attend, please register free of charge by visiting the Bett site.

For further information on ETF’s EdTech Strategy, please visit the EdTech Support page on the ETF website.